The Chosen 887Likewise, the feverish battle that erupts after
(and in spite of ) Clarissa’s sensible speech imploring
women to cultivate “Merit,” and “good Humour,” is
cast preposterously in epic proportions (5.34, 31).
Belinda calls “To Arms, to Arms!” and “to the Com-
bat flies” (5.37, 38). Both the characters and their
world of objects emerge active combatants: “Fans
clap, Silks rustle, and tough Whalebones crack,” as
the company fights “Like Gods” (5.40, 44).
Despite the ostensible disparity between the
trivial card game and its epic depiction, the superfi-
cial squabble and its representation as heroic battle,
we might note that these leisurely pursuits take place
at the queen’s royal palace among a community that
controls the nation’s military operations and orches-
trates actual battles as though they were games.
Clearly, there is more than a false or silly rela-
tionship between the social world of this poem and
the warfare that it persistently wages. While one
reading might emphasize the mock-epic disparity
between the poem’s form and content (dressing for a
social outing bears little resemblance to preparation
for war), from another perspective, the two are quite
closely connected. This was the first major era of
English imperial expansion. The international trade
in valuables such as coffee, tea, cocoa, textiles, spices,
and slaves expanded in an unparalleled fashion dur-
ing the 18th century, and much of England’s foreign
policy was organized around trade considerations.
Indeed, the poem’s frequent references to coffee, tea,
tobacco, snuff, chocolate, japanned surfaces, china
cups, fans, Indian screens and other exotic objects
point directly to England’s imperial enterprise and
to the violence—however satirized—that that enter-
prise entailed.
The poem is not without explicit acknowledg-
ment of its ideological implications. Clarissa’s direct
address to the reader in canto 5, for instance, warns
against overvaluing the fleeting honors of imperial
victory and the “vain . . . Glories” of war (5.15).
And yet her moral goes entirely unheeded by the
company, who, upon its conclusion, immediately
erupts into an elaborate physical fight. As though
in alliance with Clarissa, the speaker concludes the
poem by reproving the kind of rewards that are
“obtain’d with Guilt, and kept with Pain” (1.109) and
with which “no Mortal must be blest” (1.111), and
yet these sentiments are offered very much at the
expense of the characters in the poem. Their merits
are left to the reader to weigh.
While it might be argued that the mock-epic
structure serves to mystify the very real relationship
between the poem’s many spoils and the impe-
rial violence with which they have, in reality, been
acquired and brought home, other strains of the
poem seem insistent on exposing this relationship.
The social world of this poem—its luxury, comforts,
games, and trivial character—is made possible by
the realities of political and commercial struggle,
war, and imperial conquest. If the poem’s mock vio-
lence distances the reader from serious recognition
of these realities, Clarissa’s speech and the speaker’s
final address to the reader do much to compensate.
Hilary EnglertPoTok, CHaim The Chosen (1967)
A finalist for the National Book Award, The Chosen,
by Chaim Potok, is a classic novel about a friendship
between an unlikely pair. When Danny Saunders,
an Orthodox Hasidic Jew, shatters a pair of glasses
into Reuven Malter’s eye with a baseball during a
tournament between schools, the two strike up a
conversation and eventually a friendship. Danny vis-
its Reuven in the hospital in an attempt to assuage
his guilt, but that leads to a partnership throughout
each boy’s high school and college career.
Danny struggles with his father’s silence and a
set of expectations for his future that counter the
dreams he cultivates to become an expert in psychol-
ogy. With the arrival of Reuven Malter, a deeply
religious but considerably more secular Jewish young
man, Danny finally has someone with whom he can
share his deepest secrets. Each boy tries to reconcile
his devout Judaism with his place in modern Ameri-
can culture, a contrast of extremes.
In addition to their friendship, the novel explores
relationships between fathers and sons. Reuven’s
relationship with his father, David Malter, a scholar
and a leader in the Zionist movement, is a warm and
nurturing one. Their connection is shown in stark
contrast to Danny’s relationship with his father,
Rabbi Isaac Saunders, the leader of a traditional sect
of Judaism. Reb Saunders chooses to raise Danny